Applying to a job in academia is tricky, especially if you are an early career imposter. To help add to the perpetual state of confusion and despair you are already in, here is an overview of mutually exclusive tips ‘n tricks! What should I put on my CV? This one is easy: you should put … Read more

Calls to reform the way we do science are becoming increasingly more frequent. Most scientists seem to agree that we should fight problems such as p hacking, publication bias, and corrupting incentives. The key question is how we should do this, but what makes a reform effective? On September 1, a quantitatively impressive group of people … Read more

What are confidence intervals? It is the time interval between when you have successfully learned what confidence intervals mean and when you start to realize that you’ve never fully understood them. As a Masters student I had to read Geoff Cumming’s “New Statistics” book, which prominently featured confidence intervals. To this day I still don’t … Read more

You have likely heard the claim that circular arguments are wrong or incoherent. In this short post I will outline why this is not the case. Circular arguments are perfectly fine; in fact, they can be quite convincing! Lets start with perhaps the most famous bad example of a circular argument: God exists because the bible … Read more

I stumbled upon an article which used a Bonferroni correction to ‘control’ family-wise error rates. While this isn’t shocking by itself, I was happily surprised by how they applied it. This is what they wrote: “In order to account for multiple comparisons, statistical significance was set at a p-value of less than 0.0056 (.05/9 tests) using … Read more

Brian Wansink is professor at Cornell University and is a high-profile researcher with an impressive track record. He is a ‘world-renowned eating behavior expert‘, White House appointed to lead the USDA committee on Dietary Guidelines (2007-2009), keynote speaker at conventions around the world, author of the bestselling books Mindless Eating and Slim by Design. As … Read more

Note: This is a slightly modified version of my post at JEPS (the Journal of European Psychology Students) With a reliable internet connection comes access to the enormous World Wide Web. Being so large, we rely on tools like Google to search and filter all this information. Additional filters can be found in sites like Wikipedia, … Read more

Do you believe in peer-review, or would you rather get rid of this false token? Do you call out people who publish statistical errors, or do you think doing this is methodological terrorism? Do you seek to advance your personal goals, or do you above all value the pursuit of science? In other words… what is … Read more

(Note: If you haven’t done so yet, be sure to read my earlier blog post as an introduction to the 4 papers with 150+ inconsistencies) Many scientists will at some point in their academic career play a game about research ethics involving discussions of case descriptions. These cases typically start with a description of a tricky scenario, for … Read more

As scientists, what are we doing? Someone once told me that when you study education (like I do) your job is to separate that which is obvious and false, from that which is obvious and true. In other words, we can often think we know something, but with a scientific methodology we can figure out if we are justified … Read more